Locations

Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center
Appointment Phone: 443-997-2663

Background

Dr. Thomas Brushart is a professor of orthopaedic surgery, neurology, and plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His area of clinical expertise is treating hand injuries and disorders, with particular expertise in treatment of nerve compression syndromes, such as carpal tunnel syndrome and ulnar neuropathy, and in reconstruction of the upper extremity compromised by nerve injury or disease. Dr. Brushart is the Brushart Professor of Hand Surgery and serves as the chief of Orthopaedic Hand Surgery.

Dr. Brushart received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College. He earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He received his orthopaedic training in the Harvard Combined Orthopaedic Residency Program and performed a fellowship in hand surgery at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He also completed a one-year hand fellowship at the Raymond Curtis Hand Center in Baltimore, where he continued to practice for 12 years before joining the Johns Hopkins Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.

For 30 years, Dr. Brushart has cared for patients with hand and peripheral nerve disorders while maintaining a research program in peripheral nerve regeneration. This synergy culminated in the writing of the book Nerve Repair, a translational work that integrates clinical and research findings to achieve new perspectives on nerve repair and regeneration.

Dr. Brushart has received numerous honors, including the Hanno Millesi Award from the World Federation of Neurological Societies, the L.W. Freeman Award from the National Spinal Cord Injury Foundation, the Joseph Boyes Award and the Emanuel Kaplan Anatomy Prize from the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. He is a member of several professional organizations, including the Society for Neuroscience and the Orthopaedic Research Society. Dr. Brushart is co-director of the Brachial Plexus Clinic at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

Fellowships

Board Certifications

Research & Publications

Research Summary

Dr. Brushart has gained wide recognition for his expertise in the treatment of hand and peripheral nerve problems, as well as his research into the restoration of function after nerve injury. He focuses on techniques of stimulating nerve fibers to regenerate after injury, reconnecting properly with muscle and skin. His special research interest is peripheral nerve regeneration.

The goal of Dr. Brushart’s research program is to improve the outcome of nerve repair by enhancing the specificity with which regenerating axons reinnervate their targets. Using retrograde labeling techniques in the rat femoral nerve model, Dr. Brushart and his team have defined a process termed preferential motor reinnervation, the tendency for motoneurons to reinnervate muscle rather than skin when regenerating in mixed nerve. In exploring the mechanism of this phenomenon, they have recently demonstrated that cutaneous and muscle nerve differ significantly in their ability to make growth-supporting proteins, and that these differences correlate with their ability to support modality-specific regeneration. Similarly, they have found that electrical stimulation for one hour at the time of nerve repair enhances regeneration specificity.

Dr. Brushart’s current projects are: (1) correlation of upper extremity function with regeneration specificity in the rat upper extremity; (2) phenotypic changes in denervated Schwann cells and their effects on regeneration; (3) development of a two-chamber in vitro model of nerve repair; and (4) the effects of pathway-derived neurotrophins on peripheral axon regeneration.